Why do miners need to be forced to adopt a fee policy? If it's a good idea there's nothing stopping them from implementing it right now. How do you decide on the optimum value for the magic constant that you want to embed into the block validation rules? |
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In the future I think mining will be done by organizations that have a lot of transactions to process, and the incentive to mine will be the commerce those transactions enable. Whether they do it themselves, or in pools, or outsource it to dedicated mining companies is impossible to predict.
Could you elaborate on this? A few examples, maybe. Right now Silk Road and Satoshi Dice are the most obvious examples. Their businesses can not exist without the features Bitcoin provides so if other people stopped mining for some they would have an economic incentive to step in and mine so that their businesses can continue operating. Soon we might be able add a growing list of web businesses who deliver products and services to customers who can not access the legacy financial system. Any of that that commerce can't take place without Bitcoin creates an economic incentive for those businesses to mine (directly or otherwise). If Bitcoin grows to the point at which huge companies like Walmart and McDonalds are depending on it they would spend money to keep the network operating, because it would be necessary to protect their revenue. |
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Understood (although I think gold is an important metal in creating a lot of quality equipment) - I just think that if the *main* point of Bitcoin was just tx's then the *main reason* to be a miner would be to earn fees (and quite likely that will be how things come to pass down the track) so if we are going to wish for more and more tx's to be processed then I would not surprised to see the fees becoming >= Paypal's (in which case Bitcoin is *dead*). We're in the bootstrapping phase right now so the incentives for mining are distorted by the block subsidy. In the future I think mining will be done by organizations that have a lot of transactions to process, and the incentive to mine will be the commerce those transactions enable. Whether they do it themselves, or in pools, or outsource it to dedicated mining companies is impossible to predict. |
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Sure - but how is it *worse* than gold right now (I think that gold is still considered about the best store of value and it is not at all an easy medium of exchange compared to Bitcoin as of today)? Gold is also hoarded by central banks, and traded by firms that get to borrow play money from the Fed at negative real interest rates. How well would it do as a store of value without the support of government intervention? I don't think it would be worthless, but metals like copper are actually used to build useful things much more so than gold. |
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Bitcoin will never be a viable store of value in the long term if it's not first and foremost a medium of exchange. Trying to make it work the other way around is pushing on the string.
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You know at some point we will be forced to accept multiple Internets, there is no way around this. We will never be able to make the network large enough to accommodate any sizable portion of the human population. So maybe there really wasnt any point in me writing this post, what it talks about is probably already inevitable =P.
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well, thats your opinion. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think that's the most effective way to reassure potential customers that you're not going to run off with their Bitcoins like an uncountable number of similar ventures have in the past. |
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If Satoshi Dice really is profitable on its own merits then they could afford to mine their own transactions instead of paying other miners to do it via transaction fees. If they could do that and still remain profitable then nobody could rightly complain that they were leeching off of the network.
In the long term when medium and large companies are using bitcoin that's what I expect to happen anyway - the companies doing the most transactions have the largest incentive to make sure those transactions get included in the blockchain so they mine themselves or band together with other companies to form a merchant pool.
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1 transaction out of 9 = 11%
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If certain bitcoin sites improved their efficiency the block size issue is a non issue. But why do that when you can spread FUD instead. Sooner or later Bitcoin will need to have the additional transaction capacity, even if the one badly-behaving site you're talking about wasn't around. Looking at the attention Bitcoin is getting in the media, and the rate at which new sites are adoption Bitcoin for payment, and the rate at which exchanges and payment processors are starting up around the world, my bet is on "sooner". |
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I think Satoshi Dice should mine its own transactions instead of paying fees.
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There is obviously going to be a market even if there is no scarcity with the block size. It's not going to be much of a market, the fees would go really low and the hash power really low as well, but there would be a "lowest point" so to speak. Let me make sure I correctly understand what you're saying. If miners are not limited by protocol to a fixed block size, space in the blocks will no longer be scarce. Miners have an infinite amount of bandwidth, disk space, and processing power so they will be able to include an infinite number of transactions in a block with absolutely no marginal cost, because if any of these things are not true then space would be scarce. Because miners have the infinite capability to generate blocks of unlimited size, they will automatically do so. This will make space in the blockchain is free nobody will include fees in their transactions. The only possible option miners will have to respond to this by quitting mining entirely, strangely even though we already established they have infinite free bandwidth and processing power to mine with. Bitcoin will fail because mining, like every other business in the world, becomes cripplingly unprofitable if the industry is allowed to increase capacity to match higher demand. The amount of transactions that can be processed must remain fixed in order for people to be willing to invest capital equipment into mining and thus keep the network secure. It's just like how we limit the worldwide car market to 100 new cars per year in order no matter how many people want to buy. It's the best way to keep the industry decentralized. |
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I expect the USA to follow the same trajectory USSR. At some point the unfunded liabilities will make the continuance of the political system untenable so they will shed those obligations by dissolving it.
A "new" government will be formed to take its place, and to the surprise of no one the same assholes will still be in charge just under a different name. It will probably be less totalitarian though in the same way that Russia is less totalitarian than the USSR because it's more profitable for the rulers that way.
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I welcome a price dip, as long as it happens before my Dwolla transfer to Mutum Sigillum LLC clears tomorrow.
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Isn't this entirely resolved by the customizable change address option "Remember for future transactions"? (in expert usermode) Only if that option will remember different policies on a per-wallet basis. The way I manage my casual spending wallet is not the same as the way I manage my offline cold storage wallet. Let's say I was going to have wallets without any deterministic components, and without the ability to generate new addresses. If you create such a wallet and import a key, and then you send a transaction... where is the change supposed to go? How is Armory supposed to handle this? The way I see it, there's only two real options: (1) send it back to one of the input addresses (first option), or let the user specify where to send it (second option). Both options are available, and can be remembered between loads by checking the box. If the wallet only contains a single address then all change should go back to that address. That's how blockchain.info does it. The only gap I can think of is the case that the user wants to send change back to one of the input addresses, but not the first one. Perhaps they want to see a list of input addresses used and want to pick one. I can't see that being useful enough that it would be worth the implementation time. Does Armory support constructing a transaction where the inputs come from more than one wallet? That's the only possible case in which an ambiguity could arise in the use case I am talking about. |
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If I understand correctly the new wallet format is primarily intended to support BIP 32, but will it also support non-deterministic or even "single-key" wallets?
The reason I ask is because I have imported my blockchain.info private key into an Armory wallet so that my ability to spend those funds is not limited to blockchain.info's uptime. In order to do this I had to make a regular deterministic wallet and manually add the key (which is fine), but I never had the option to dispense with the unneeded deterministic keys. It also means that any time I use Armory to initiate a transaction instead of the web client I must be careful to manually specify the change address to avoid sending it to the deterministic addresses.
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the criticism here is that miners with access to huge bandwidth will mine huge blocks and disadvantage the smaller miners because these can't dl the block fast enough to restart mining. You need the newest block in order to mine. The fear is that this would result in greater centralization. There is a very simple solution to that, and Gavin addressed it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.msg1503099#msg1503099 Nobody wants to talk about that, though. The people who want to keep the transaction rate limited never acknowledge the straightforward solutions to the supposed problems that would result from increasing the limit. They talk about scalability as if there are not known solutions to the problem, and certainly don't offer to help implement those improvements. If the real issue here is home users being able to be equal participants in the network, then why is no one else offering to help crowd fund the development work needed to make that happen so that we can have both high transaction rates and decentralization? Is it just a coincidence that some of opponents to transaction rate scalability are also involved with other cryptocurrencies or alternate transaction processing networks whose business case is less certain if Bitcoin is allowed to scale? Why to people need to frame the necessary changes in pejorative terms like "hard fork", when they could just as easily use the neutral term, "mandatory upgrade". We've already had a few mandatory upgrades that only affected miners. This one is different because it also requires full nodes to upgrade as well, but that need was already anticipated. Blocks have a version number for a reason, and all bitcoind/bitcoin-qt clients have the capability to receive notifications from the developers for urgent messages such as a mandatory upgrade. Why is the debate about whether or not we should ever have version 3 blocks at all instead of which features should go in and how to best make the transition? Why are some developers on record participating in a conversation affirming how the block limit would be raised in the future, but today insist the limit was intentionally permanent from the beginning? If the arguments in favour of leaving the limit in place are so strong, why do they need to lie about the past? |
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The site looks great, but it desperately needs better navigation.
I can drill down through the links on Newegg to get a list of all internal SATA 3.5" form factor 7200 RPM hard drives with a capacity of 2 TB.
With Bitcoinstore I'm limited to keyword searches or manually browsing through all 647 "Storage drives" to pick out the ones I want to compare.
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On the other hand you'd probably have a hard time collecting your USD 0.1 from me in meatspace somehow. I think you're on to something there. Didn't someone a year or two ago do a cross-US road trip paying for everything with Bitcoin? Would it be possible for someone to use Ripple to barter for food and lodging during a cross-country road trip? |
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Reading slashdot is like hanging out with a an old friend that a got serious head wound somewhere along the way.
QFT |
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